Summer Reading Bundle

If you’re looking to laugh, pick up the Summer 2013 issue and read “Fifty Shades of Greyhound,” which chronicles Harrison Scott Key’s bus journey from Savannah to Asheville—and all the characters (and portable toilets) he encounters along the way.I’m writing this on the Spring Solstice, and it’s 82 degrees outside in Little Rock. Maybe I’ve just got warm weather on the mind. Still, no matter the time of year, few essays make me long to take a dip more than Lauren Groff’s “Daughters of the Springs,” about the enduring mermaid myth and the women who perform as mermaids at Weeki Wachee State Park in Florida. Read it in the Summer 2014 issue.The Summer 2015 issue was guest-edited by OA contributing editor Jamie Quatro and includes ten short stories. Every story is excellent, though I’m partial to “A Local’s Guide to Dating in Slocomb County” by Chris Drangle and “The G.R.I.E.F.” by Micah Stack, both of which are included in the 2017 Pushcart Prize anthology.Last year, we debuted our Southern Journeys special section, for which writers traveled by train, car, ferry, foot, memory, and imagination to give us eight stories of humanity on the move. As we wrote in the section’s introduction: “The journey in all its forms—going to, running from, wandering about, flying over, migrating, dispersing, coming back, moving on—is an ideal climate for narrative.” Find out why in our Summer 2016 issue (then come back in a few months for our second-annual Southern Journeys issue... on sale in June 2017!).